The politics of identity and difference in intercultural management communication: an Anglo-German study

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Women, work and the menopause: releasing the potential of older professional women

Explores the experiences of menopause for professional women as part of a broader appreciation of health and well-being in later life. Executive summary This report presents the key findings and recommendations of a research project entitled Women, Work and the Menopause: Releasing the Potential of Older Professional Women. Menopause is a ‘silent issue’ for most organisations, and older women represent a group whose working lives, experiences and aspirations are poorly understood by employers, national governments and academic researchers alike. This is highly unfortunate given that women aged 45 years and over comprise 17% of the ageing Australian workforce, meaning that over one million working women are currently going through, or have already gone through, the menopause. The broad aim of this project was therefore to examine the occupational health and well-being of older women, with a particular emphasis on understanding women’s experiences of menopause at work. More specifically, the project set out to generate insights on five key areas: 1. Older women’s health and well-being; 2. The relationship between menopause-related symptoms and four specific work outcomes (work engagement, job satisfaction, organisational commitment, intention to quit); 3. Actual and desired levels of organisational support for women experiencing menopause; 4. Work-related and organisational factors that exacerbate or ameliorate women’s experiences of menopause in the workplace; and 5. Women’s first-hand experiences, beliefs and attitudes towards menopause at work. Data collection took place between November 2013 and March 2014 via two parallel research studies. The first study consisted of an online survey (herein referred to as WAW – Women at Work Survey) of 839 women (age range 40-75 years; average age 51.3 years) employed in academic, administrative and executive roles at three Australian universities. The second study (herein referred to as Prime – The Prime Project) involved 48 qualitative interviews with academic and administrative staff members at two Australian universities. The study identified the following key findings: All age groups reported average to good mental and physical health. While self-reported physical health deteriorated with age, mental health appeared to improve with age (60+ year olds reported better mental health than 40-49 and 50-59 year olds). Among administrative and executive staff, women aged 40-49 years reported greater intention to quit their jobs than their older colleagues (50-59 years and 60+ years old). The interview study was marked by an overwhelming sense that ‘women just get on with it’. This theme captured many inter-related aspects of women’s experiences of mid-life in general (e.g., of juggling demanding and multiple work and care-giving roles) and underlined the considerable, and often unacknowledged, resilience of older professional women. Peri-women currently experiencing the menopause most frequently experienced the following symptoms associated with menopause (in descending order of prevalence): sleep disturbance, headaches, weakness or fatigue, loss of sexual desire, anxiety, memory loss, pain in bone joints, and hot flushes. None of the measured work outcomes differed by menstrual status. However, the more frequently women reported experiencing menopause-related symptoms and the more bothersome the symptoms were, the less engaged they felt at work, less satisfied with their job, the greater their intention to quit their job and the lower their commitment to the organisation. The interview findings, however, suggested that it is difficult to attribute many symptoms simply to menopause. Symptoms can also be associated with ageing and ‘the time of life’ more generally, or the occupational impact of the working environment, such as stress (notably associated with organisational change and work intensification). Negative organisational and managerial messages about older women had a significant impact on how engaged, and how included, women felt at work. There was evidence of gendered ageism, with many women only feeling able to talk informally to other close female colleagues and friends about their menopausal experiences. Organisational sub-cultures were also found to have a significant influence on women’s experience of menopause at work, creating particular demands on women to ‘fit in’ and to manage expectations and workplace identities that assumed an ‘unproblematic body’. Work-related and organisational factors played important roles in ameliorating or exacerbating women’s experience of menopause at work. Temperature control over their immediate environment was important, as was the exacerbating impact of the increasingly sedentary nature of work that might intensify menopausal-related symptoms. However, paid employment also held positive benefits for some women, ameliorating their symptoms and providing an environment in which to develop and blossom as strong, independent and energetic employees. The flexibility of working arrangements (notably in respect of work time) was a particular characteristic that benefited (menopausal) women. Both the survey and the interviews pointed to a lack of menopause-specific support or information in their organisational settings. Many were unsure whether line managers were given training in awareness of the menopause in the workplace. While organisations should provide information, there were varying views about whether organisations should or could introduce menopause-specific policies, or whether that would only serve to marginalise or problematise older workers. While women did not want formal management or ‘intervention’ of the menopause, organisational understanding and support was deemed to be important and part of a broader message as to whether older women were welcome in the workplace or not. This report proposes a number of recommendations related to Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) and Human Resources (HR) Management, and emphasises the role of general organisational processes, policies and professional bodies in initiating change. To plan for improved working conditions for older women now, is to ensure that organisations will reap future rewards by acknowledging and investing in this reliable, loyal, committed and resilient segment of the workforce. &nbsp

Decolonising management studies

Business schools and universities across the world are being swept up by a diversified array of decolonising movements. Nimruji Jammulamadaka, Alex Faria, Gavin Jack, and Shaun Ruggunan explore the practice of decolonising in management and organisation scholarship, challenging the notion of decolonising as a theoretical project. They propose reclaiming decolonising as a radical praxis of ‘(un)doing academia’ that transforms us and the ways we understand and practice management, do research and how we produce and spread management knowledge

Women’s health in/and work: menopause as an intersectional experience

This paper employs an intersectional lens to explore menopausal experiences of women working in the higher education and healthcare sectors in Australia. Open-text responses from surveys across three universities and three healthcare settings were subject to a multistage qualitative data analysis. The findings explore three aspects of menopause experience that required women to contend with a constellation of aged, gendered and ableist dynamics and normative parameters of labor market participation. Reflecting on the findings, the paper articulates the challenges of menopause as issues of workplace inequality that are rendered visible through an intersectional lens. The paper holds a range of implications for how to best support women going through menopause at work. It emphasizes the need for approaches to tackle embedded and more complex modes of inequality that impact working women’s menopause, and ensure that workforce policy both protects and supports menopausal women experiencing intersectional disadvantage

BlockSwap: Fisher-guided Block Substitution for Network Compression on a Budget

The desire to map neural networks to varying-capacity devices has led to the development of a wealth of compression techniques, many of which involve replacing standard convolutional blocks in a large network with cheap alternative blocks. However, not all blocks are created equally; for a required compute budget there may exist a potent combination of many different cheap blocks, though exhaustively searching for such a combination is prohibitively expensive. In this work, we develop BlockSwap: a fast algorithm for choosing networks with interleaved block types by passing a single minibatch of training data through randomly initialised networks and gauging their Fisher potential. These networks can then be used as students and distilled with the original large network as a teacher. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the chosen networks across CIFAR-10 and ImageNet for classification, and COCO for detection, and provide a comprehensive ablation study of our approach. BlockSwap quickly explores possible block configurations using a simple architecture ranking system, yielding highly competitive networks in orders of magnitude less time than most architecture search techniques (e.g. under 5 minutes on a single GPU for CIFAR-10). Code is available at https://github.com/BayesWatch/pytorch-blockswap.Comment: ICLR 202

The associations between objectively-determined and self-reported urban form characteristics and neighborhood-based walking in adults

BACKGROUND: Self-reported and objectively-determined neighborhood built characteristics are associated with physical activity, yet little is known about their combined influence on walking. This study: 1) compared self-reported measures of the neighborhood built environment between objectively-determined low, medium, and high walkable neighborhoods; 2) estimated the relative associations between self-reported and objectively-determined neighborhood characteristics and walking and; 3) examined the extent to which the objectively-determined built environment moderates the association between self-reported measures of the neighborhood built environment and walking. METHODS: A random cross-section of 1875 Canadian adults completed a telephone-interview and postal questionnaire capturing neighborhood walkability, neighborhood-based walking, socio-demographic characteristics, walking attitudes, and residential self-selection. Walkability of each respondent’s neighborhood was objectively-determined (low [LW], medium [MW], and high walkable [HW]). Covariate-adjusted regression models estimated the associations between weekly participation and duration in transportation and recreational walking and self-reported and objectively-determined walkability. RESULTS: Compared with objectively-determined LW neighborhoods, respondents in HW neighborhoods positively perceived access to services, street connectivity, pedestrian infrastructure, and utilitarian and recreation destination mix, but negatively perceived motor vehicle traffic and crime related safety. Compared with residents of objectively-determined LW neighborhoods, residents of HW neighborhoods were more likely (p < .05) to participate in (odds ratio [OR] = 3.06), and spend more time, per week (193 min/wk) transportation walking. Perceived access to services, street connectivity, motor vehicle safety, and mix of recreational destinations were also significantly associated with transportation walking. With regard to interactions, HW x utilitarian destination mix was positively associated with participation, HW x physical barriers and MW x pedestrian infrastructure were positively associated with minutes, and HW x safety from crime was negatively associated with minutes, of transportation walking. Neither neighborhood type nor its interactions with perceived measures of walkability were associated with recreational walking, although perceived aesthetics was associated with participation (OR = 1.18, p < .05). CONCLUSIONS: Objectively-determined and self-reported built characteristics are associated with neighborhood-based transportation walking. The objectively-determined built environment might moderate associations between perceptions of walkability and neighborhood-based transportation walking. Interventions that target perceptions in addition to modifications to the neighborhood built environment could result in increases in physical activity among adults

Story Telling and Truth-Telling: Personal Reflections on the Native American Experience in Law Schools

In January of 2021, the American Association of Law Schools (“AALS”) theme was Freedom, Equality and the Common Good. The Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples Section of the AALS embraced the theme and announced a call for personal reflections incorporating the experiences of Native Americans in law schools. The theme of striving for academic freedom and equality allows for an in-depth questioning of whether Native Americans have been adequately and appropriately represented in legal curricula in the nation’s approximately two hundred law schools. The aspirational goal of realizing the common good must be inclusive of Native American voices as students, faculty, staff, and graduates and in curricula choices in law schools across the country. There has been sparse legal scholarship on the experience of Native American applicants, law students, faculty, and staff in law schools. The Indigenous perspective essays in this compilation are an opportunity to hear the voices of Indigenous peoples on their lived experiences in seeking law degrees and careers in law-related fields. Words such as resiliency, endurance, and perseverance often come to mind when Native Americans discuss their personal experiences in the legal academy. The following collection of essays are a contribution to the legal academy in the Indigenous tradition of storytelling shared as firsthand accounts through the seven authors’ perspectives. Within the personal reflections, the tenacity of Native people to succeed and overcome barriers is a common theme. Many of the contributors speak to the value of mentoring or becoming a Native lawyer to serve as a mentor. The compilation provides insight into the experience the authors share of a deep commitment to their Indigenous communities and to trailblazing for the next generation of Native lawyers

GlomSpheres as a 3D co-culture spheroid model of the kidney glomerulus for rapid drug-screening

The glomerulus is the filtration unit of the kidney. Injury to any component of this specialised structure leads to impaired filtration and eventually fibrosis and chronic kidney disease. Current two and three dimensional (2D and 3D) models that attempt to recreate structure and interplay between glomerular cells are imperfect. Most 2D models are simplistic and unrepresentative, and 3D organoid approaches are currently difficult to reproduce at scale and do not fit well with current industrial drug-screening approaches. Here we report a rapidly generated and highly reproducible 3D co-culture spheroid model (GlomSpheres), better demonstrating the specialised physical and molecular structure of a glomerulus. Co-cultured using a magnetic spheroid formation approach, conditionally immortalised (CI) human podocytes and glomerular endothelial cells (GEnCs) deposited mature, organized isoforms of collagen IV and Laminin. We demonstrate a dramatic upregulation of key podocyte (podocin, nephrin and podocalyxin) and GEnC (pecam-1) markers. Electron microscopy revealed podocyte foot process interdigitation and endothelial vessel formation. Incubation with pro-fibrotic agents (TGF-β1, Adriamycin) induced extracellular matrix (ECM) dysregulation and podocyte loss, which were attenuated by the anti-fibrotic agent Nintedanib. Incubation with plasma from patients with kidney disease induced acute podocyte loss and ECM dysregulation relative to patient matched remission plasma, and Nintedanib reduced podocyte loss. Finally, we developed a rapid imaging approach to demonstrate the model’s usefulness in higher throughput pharmaceutical screening. GlomSpheres therefore represent a robust, scalable, replacement for 2D in vitro glomerular disease models

From Earth to Orbit: An assessment of transportation options

The report assesses the requirements, benefits, technological feasibility, and roles of Earth-to-Orbit transportation systems and options that could be developed in support of future national space programs. Transportation requirements, including those for Mission-to-Planet Earth, Space Station Freedom assembly and operation, human exploration of space, space science missions, and other major civil space missions are examined. These requirements are compared with existing, planned, and potential launch capabilities, including expendable launch vehicles (ELV's), the Space Shuttle, the National Launch System (NLS), and new launch options. In addition, the report examines propulsion systems in the context of various launch vehicles. These include the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM), the Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor (RSRM), the Solid Rocket Motor Upgrade (SRMU), the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME), the Space Transportation Main Engine (STME), existing expendable launch vehicle engines, and liquid-oxygen/hydrocarbon engines. Consideration is given to systems that have been proposed to accomplish the national interests in relatively cost effective ways, with the recognition that safety and reliability contribute to cost-effectiveness. Related resources, including technology, propulsion test facilities, and manufacturing capabilities are also discussed